PARIS - Looking to get away for a weekend fling without getting caught? A new French company provides would-be adulterers with custom-made excuses that help take the danger of discovery out of cheating.
Founded six months ago by former private eye Regine Mourizard, can cook up invites to phony weekend seminars, fake emergency phone calls from work, invitations to nonexistent weddings -- anything to justify cheating spouses' absence.
Mourizard said her service is aimed at protecting couples and families by allowing adulterers to live their flings undetected.
"If the alibi is well done and the spouse doesn't suspect anything, this can sometimes save marriages," Mourizard told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
Here's how it works: In an e-mail message or call to Ibila, the prospective client requests an alibi for a specific date and time. Mourizard concocts just the right excuse, taking into account the client's profession and personal circumstances.
She and her co-worker, a computer specialist, draw up fake restaurant and hotel bills, receipts and other documents to help shore up what Mourizard calls her "little white lies."
If the adulterer was supposed to have been away for a seminar, the company can even provide the kinds of freebies -- pens, hats and tee-shirts -- sometimes given at such events.
Mourizard said she that because of privacy issues, she could only give details about one of her past clients, whom she called "Geraldine."
Married to a "strict man," Geraldine was desperate to get out of the house for an hour-long meeting with an ex-boyfriend who lived abroad and was briefly passing through town.
"This man was practically the love of her life and she had to see him," Mourizard said. Together, they hatched a plan.
Geraldine owned a driving school, so on the appointed day, Mourizard called her home pretending to be a student who needed a last-minute lesson before her driving test the following day.
"The husband totally bought it. He even offered to get the car out of the garage for her," Mourizard said.
The simplest excuses -- like Geraldine's -- cost euro19 (US$27), while more the more elaborate and time-consuming alibis can run upward of euro150 (US$207).
Mourizard insisted her business is completely above board because she concocts fake bills from invented companies, hotels and restaurants and does not doctor or forge real documents. She also requires clients to sign a document pledging not to use her materials to swindle their employers or the French government.
Upon request, the company can handle the logistics for clients' secret rendezvous, from making hotel reservations to booking train and plane tickets. Ibila also offers to buy illicit gifts, so that suspicious purchases at flower, perfume or chocolate shops don't appear on clients' bank statements.
Most of her clients -- about 60 per cent -- are men, Mourizard said. They range in age from 25-60, but most are in their mid-forties.
Mourizard, a 50-year-old mother of two, said it was her experience as a private detective that led her to open Ibila -- Europe's second such service, she said.
"For 20 years, I worked to keep people from doing what they wanted to do. And I then thought, 'what if I help them do it, in a safe way?'"
Following a "very amicable" divorce from her first husband, Mourizard remarried two years ago. Asked what her spouse thinks of her new business, she said: "He thinks I have some pretty bizarre ideas."
Is he suspicious when she gets strange phone calls or receives unexpected invitations in the mail?
"No, he trusts me completely. And I trust him. I mean, if he were cheating, I'd find him out in a second," she said.
